How Many Parts In A Triumph Herald Heater?

This Herald is in much better condition than my 12/50 was. Philafrenzy [CC BY-SA 4.0]What was your first car? Mine was a 1965 Triumph Herald 12/50 in conifer green, and to be frank, it was a bit of a dog.

The Triumph Herald is a small saloon car manufactured between about 1959 and 1971. If you are British your grandparents probably had one, though if you are not a Brit you may have never heard of it. Americans may be familiar with the Triumph Spitfire sports car, a derivative on a shortened version of the same platform. It was an odd car even by the standards of British cars of the 1950s and 1960s. Standard Triumph, the manufacturer, had a problem with their pressing plant being owned by a rival, so had to design a car that used pressings of a smaller size that they could do in-house. Thus the Herald was one of the last British mass-produced cars to have a separate chassis, at a time when all other manufacturers had produced moncoques for years.

My 12/50 was the sporty model, it had the high-lift cam from the Spitfire and a full-length Britax sunroof. It was this sunroof that was its downfall, when I had it around a quarter century of rainwater had leaked in and rotted its rear bodywork. This combined with the engine being spectacularly tired and the Solex carburetor having a penchant for flooding the engine with petrol made it more of a pretty thing to look at than a useful piece of transport. But I loved it, tended it, and when it finally died irreparably I broke it for parts. Since then I’ve had four other Heralds of various different varieties, and the current one, a 1960 Herald 948, I’ve owned since the early 1990s. A piece of advice: never buy version 0 of a car.

Understand Manufacturing Through A Rusty Wreck

A sectioned early Herald produced as a promotional exhibit by Standard Triumph. Andrew Bone [CC BY 2.0]If you want to really understand mass production, own a classic car. By that I don’t mean own a classic car in the sense of middle-aged men who wear string-backed driving gloves and keep a stable of gleaming garage jewelry they describe in terms of investment value. Instead I mean own one in the sense of keeping a tired old wreck on the road simply for the love of spannering. For that way you will find over time that there is no part of the vehicle with which you do not become completely intimate, you will at some point dismantle and reassemble all of its components. And as you do that you will become familiar with how a car is built, and what decisions shaped how it must have been put together.

On a Herald, most things are very accessible. The chassis based construction and unusual tilt-over front bodywork mean that there is less to get in the way than there would be on a monocoque vehicle. Of course there are one or two oddities. For example, I have never quite understood how they must have done up one of the nuts in the middle of the exhaust manifold. But mostly it’s a modular car, which is why it lent itself to so many kit car designs of the 1970s and 1980s.

An Economical Yet Overly Complex Heater

A Herald heater unit, without its fan assembly.

If there is one thing that sums up both the sheer idiocy of the Herald’s design and the miraculous nature of mass production in enabling complex products to be made affordable, it’s the heater unit. This sits in the engine bay beneath the windscreen, somewhere above the bell housing, and it’s a pressed steel box containing a small radiator and centrifugal fan. The coolant valve failed on mine, and while I was at it I had the whole unit out, stripped it, and reconditioned it.

A modern clip-together plastic heater unit, from a Volkswagen Polo.

A modern car heater usually has two plastic moldings held together by spring clips. You position valve, motor and fan, and radiator core in the bottom one as though they were menu items from a TV dinner, pop the top molding on, and do up the clips. A masterpiece of design for economy of mass production. It’s possible to take one apart in about a minute, and probably if you are practiced, to assemble it in the same time.

Not so the Herald heater. It’s a beautifully made unit, consisting of several complex spot welded pressed steel assemblies held together by a huge number of small self-tapping screws. There is a main box with some complexity around its openings, a curved fan cowl with an insert for the air inlet, and a radiator unit. The radiator isn’t the aluminium item with molded plastic end pieces you’d find in the modern car, instead it’s a rather beautiful soldered brass affair. Taking apart a Herald heater is an undertaking that’s not especially difficult, but it’s one you’ll have to put aside around twenty minutes to achieve.

Are We Really Disrupting Anything Here?

The main assemblies of a Herald heater. Not shown is a huge pile of self-tapping screws.

As I dismantled my rather rusty unit, I found myself wondering just how it had been manufactured, what had influenced its design, and just how it had been possible to consider mass producing them at a sensible price. The number of individual operations required to make each individual component is huge, and given that each one of them would have required an individual operator and machine it must have been quite an involved process. Comparing it with its modern equivalent, its percentage of the cost of the finished vehicle must have been significantly larger. It’s amazing that a Triumph Herald or any other car could be produced at anything near a sensible price.

As makers, we’re used to producing our work in one-off quantities. Imagine you needed a car heater and you couldn’t just pull one from a scrap car, but you didn’t have to go back to first principles like [Thomas Thwaites] with his toaster. Starting with a lot of brass sheet, tube, and a big soldering iron you could make a radiator in a day or two maybe, then perhaps you could do the sheet steel box in a morning. Add an off-the-shelf fan and motor, and maybe you could do it within a working week. I don’t know what your rate is, but if someone hired me to do that I’d charge somewhere in four figures.

Britain in the 1950s and 60s was not a country of particularly low wages, yet much of its industry had not modernised far beyond its heyday of the Victorian era. The Herald line at the Triumph plant in Canley was reported as being very advanced for its time, but the component suppliers were probably much as they had been in the 1920s or before. We are fond of championing the power of our maker culture as a new form of manufacturing that is better than traditional mass production, yet this archaic factory producing ridiculously overcomplex car heaters shows us that even when the product has a spectacularly awful design from a time-to-build perspective we’re still nowhere near the ease and economy of mass production.

I cleaned and repainted the components of my heater, reassembled it, and put it back in the car. The coolant valve that had failed is available as a remanufactured replacement part, but I balked at the outrageous £70 ($88) price tag and fitted a microbore plumbing gate valve instead. A warm car trumps originality, every time.

My shattered faith in maker culture as a new manufacturing paradigm may take longer to repair.

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67 thoughts on “How Many Parts In A Triumph Herald Heater?”

Interesting comparisons in this article, Jenny. Thanks for sharing it!
And despite being an American, I have indeed heard of the Triumph Herald. Probably due to spending years and years watching British motoring shows.

Heater cores are, by far, my least favorite task to do on a car. Engine overhauls are easy.

But most heater units in vehicles follow the same design flow: Simple Squirrel Cage fan blowing across the heater (and in cars with AC, the condensor), major differences is how heat is turned on and off. Some cars have a valve that isolates the heater core from the cooling system, some use a flap door to either expose or cover the heater core, or switch between the heater core and the AC Evaporator.

The worst part is while manufacturers did attempt to make the heater cores modular (i.e. In the VW Jetta Mk 3, the Heater Core was built in such a way to be able to slide in and out of the air exchange box with ease) they then position the air box right up against the firewall, where it is nigh inaccessible without tearing the entire dash apart.

Its a case of ease of manufacturing over ease of maintenance, because for the most part they don’t expect the vehicle to outlive the individual components like the heater core.

Actually they should…. given manufacturers maintenance is ever followed correctly… they specifically state premix or distilled water to dilute concentrate antifreeze in the coolant system only, and ppl still use their nastyass tapwater.

Yah, everyone used to tell me “it’s fine, it’s fine” too, then I figured out why I was replacing radiators every 3 or 4 years.

usually because of some “engineer” that needs to be beaten with a sack of door knobs. Every car engineer should be forced to work on the car they design and tazed every time anything major has to be disassembled for no good reason.

BMW Xdrive transfer case fluid change should be trivial. except the asshole engineer designated the bolt holding the exhaust there be put in front to back. This makes it a nightmare to get out and requires removal of a lot of items. On reassembly you insert the bolt from the rear and it’ is trivial to reinstall and remove later.

Just yesterday dropped by my friend’s shop, he was working on a BMW X5 with the 4.4l engine.

There is an oil ‘thermostat’ tube that passes through the power steering bracket, sealed by a simple rubber gasket. It failed, leaking oil everwhere. In order to get to it, however, you have to drop the transmission.
Why? Because the transmission is immediately below the engine, covering the oil pan and any brackets connected to the motor. Turning what should be a 1-2 hour job into a 8-12 hour job by the book.

You have to drop the subframe, the transmission, the power steering pump, and remove the CV on the driver’s side in order to access what is a really poorly plumbed part.

My uncle was a longtime machinist at a machine shop that made parts for Caterpillar. His biggest complaint was that new engineers have never taken a drafting class or a fabrication class, and learn the entire design process on CAD. I’ve never used a lathe or a mill in my life, so what I’m describing might be a little off, but his chief complaints are that new engineers don’t seem to worry about how anything gets machined or attached to anything.

For instance, in one case he was machining engine blocks, and the parts were supposed to be bolted down using a particular hole, but the clearance for said hole was less than the length of the bolt needed to secure the part to the mill. Another thing he complained about was the fact that people using CAD don’t seem to worry about where their origin points are. So all the measurements will be from some imaginary point in space a foot in the air off to the left of the part, where it is basically impossible to measure from, not to mention it forces you to use a bigger mill than is necessary.

I actually ran in to an engineer for Caterpillar who was about my age recently, and he was like “Yeah, your uncle is almost certainly complaining about engineers like me.” He definitely seemed to know a lot on the engineering side, but he readily admitted that he didn’t have the foggiest when it came to how parts were going to be machined, only what the estimated cost to make a given part would be.

I think the problem lies less in the fact that the engineer knows how to machine or lathe and more that the feedback loop from machinist, assembler, production team, or whatever back to the original designer can be limited because of the way modern manufacturing works. A class will only take you so far but continued feedback from the people who actually put together your designs is invaluable.

When I was a new engineer, my machinist was literally outside my door. So that was quite helpful (learned that Feature CAM was very optimistic about tool path speeds). In many cases, production fixtures that i designed were also assembled and maintained by me, the machinists only built the components. So you had to pay attention to assembly & maintenance. It wasn’t really a case of throwing a design over the wall…

In addition, I got my degree by going to school for 10 years, and my day job was a EW Tech (Air Force). So I had plenty of “hands on experience” before working as an engineer. And I owned a Fiat X1/9 (getting back to the spirit of the original post)…. had to Macgyver a new muffler mount, as well as a interesting fix to my shifter linkage until I could get the correct part..

Another fun one the fuel pump on a Jaguar XK8 you have to drop the rear end to get at the fuel lines so you can drop the tank though someone eventually invented some tool that allow you to skip that process.
Of course on the other end of the spectrum on a 2000s Grand Prix they were nice enough to put an access panel for the fuel pump and when I discovered that all I can say is why didn’t they do this on the F bodies.
Of course they go and be assholes again since you need an expensive tool to do crank relearn if you ever change out the crank sensor.

The most recent Corvette model has some plastic box at the right rear of the engine compartment. It has a couple of easy to undo, tool-free latches on it. Must be something made for ease of service.

But running right over the top of it is some tube or pipe that’s rather well fixed in place, making whatever is in that easy to open box impossible to get at without taking apart who knows what all else. Kudos to the box designer but whomever designed and approved the placement of the parts blocking it should be grabbed by their ears and their faces rubbed in their stupid design while being told in very colorful terms how dumb that is.

General motors front wheel drive automatics of the 80’s and early 90’s had an issue with the Torque Converter Clutch solenoid valve sticking open, causing the TCC to stay engaged as the car came to a stop, killing the engine exactly like forgetting to push the clutch pedal with a manual transmission. The engine could be restarted in Park but soon as you’d shift to Drive it’d die if the valve hadn’t closed properly. Kicking the brake pedal a few times sometimes would cause the balky valve to close. (TCC valve is supposed to close to disengage the TCC when the brakes are applied.)

Changing the valve wasn’t a difficult job. Remove the right front wheel and plastic splash guard then you can get the end pan off the transmission. But uh-oh, the transmission cooler lines are routed directly over the bolt heads along the front edge of the pan. So you have to loosen the line fittings at the transmission to be able to push the lines forward a bit. They’re soft brass fittings screwed into aluminum so there’s a chance they may just snap off instead of unscrewing. The lines could have been routed 1″ farther forward, making them a little shorter and saving a few cents a car – and a service job much faster and easier.

The worst part of this was there was never a recall on the TCC valve. Who knows how many rear-end collisions those faulty valves caused?

A question though, is it the first time anyone had to mess with it in 50 years? And the point that it COULD be repaired and reasonable part substitution made. Given a positive answer to the former, leads to wondering if the originating engineer is around to help design the air handling systems for my moonbase…. :-D

Nice write-up Jenny. It brought back memories. I learned to drive in a Herald in 1968/9. They were very easy to drive and seemed to be popular with dirving instructors in the Salford/Stockport area at the time. My first car though was a Ford Anglia 1200 which required quite a lot of TLC to keep it going.

Ah, the Herald! My dad’s first new car in 1960. I was 5. Like nearly all British cars it was a beauty to behold, a nightmare to maintain, but he loved it. Drove it until 1964 when he got accordionated between a car and a truck on the Cross-Bronx Expressway. That chassis construction probably saved his life as he was unhurt, though it took a while to pull his 6′ 6″ 250 lb frame out of the tiny car. I did a repeat performance on exactly the same spot 12 years later in a 1959 VW Bug. Like father like son. Would have enjoyed taking the old Herald apart had it survived into my teenage years – the VW had to do instead.

I owned a Spitfire at one point. But those modern, two piece plastic heater boxes didn’t take long to show up – my ’66 Dart’s heater box fits that description, and it’s an old enough car that one doesn’t have to disassemble the entire dash to get to it, either. Still has a soldered brass core inside it like the Triumph’s. Not sure when this design first appeared on this side of the pond.

My GT-6 is sitting in the driveway, TR6 in the garage. May the gods help you if you need to replace the heater core in a GT-6! But, like it’s cousins the Spitfire and Herald, working in the engine compartment is a dream. Even has two convenient seats, aka front tires.

On the flip side, the TR6 has a hole in the fender liner behind the front wheel to put a socket on an extension to remove the oil filter cover…And I can change any u-joint (there are 6) in 45 minutes or less. It’s the next weak link when you up the HP. ;)

The bores in those things don’t wear, ever, did the headgasket on one at 125,000, bores had super finne hone marks you could buff your nails on… got back in there when a cooling system cascade failure cracked the head…180,000 mile later… same! Burned no oil, only went about a 6th of the way down the marks on a 10K interval.

The resistor ladder for my heater fan speed burned out on my car so instead of paying $50 for a replacement based on how you controlled electric motors in 1900, I ripped apart a cordless drill and used the controller with a rotary potmeter instead of the trigger push button. Now I have stepless control of fan speed and saving half the power. Later my fan motor wore down the commutators, so it was replaced with four server fans, a perfect fit and the sound is roaring.

Won’t those fans die fast because of the humidity?
They were designed to run in servers which run in relatively clean server rooms, not cars which can go from -10°C to +30°C (and that’s if you live somewhere with sensible weather) and wildly changing humidity…

The heater units were bought in and made elsewhere, the herald had a smiths unit, so the manufacturers of that unit had a seperate production line, just the same way that delphi etc make units servicing car manufacturers now. Smiths also provided units to land rover and a plethoria of other manufacturers too. The design shop at triumph got provided with the packaging dimensions of suitable units when drawing it up and made it fit the space. I’m not sure if they couldnt specify the housing shape or that had to be folded up on site to match the modular innards.
Really car plants (especially nowadays) are assemblers of bought in modules from 3rd party suppliers. In the heyday of the Herald more was done in house, but still heater and instrumentation from smiths or jaegar, electrics from the prince of darkness aka lucas, or delco or one of the other big names, brakes from lockheed or girling, axles from rubery owen rockwell, drive components from gkn etc.
If you go to a modern plant, dotted around it because of JIT manufacturing are all the sub assembly suppliers plants, all tasked with delivery to a tight schedule to keep the plant running, with heavy penalties if timeslots are missed.

If your also frustrated by working on something more modern and think its brain dead, its mostly because the engineers recruited have very little practical experience, vauxhall’s for instance recruited & promoted people with a degree qualification in *any* subject over and above trade or experience qualified personel, got a degree in philosophy or history? jump to head of the queue or get promoted into design and never have to get your hands dirty working on what you designed. They also made changes against maintainability deliberately.
For example vauxhall’s had a scheme called the IDEAS scheme, where a employee could send in a idea to improve the car in some way. When I worked there, the single largest payout was to a assembly line worker who suggested the drain plug was eliminated from rear axle assemblies. The win being the cover didnt need punching/flowforming a thread/screwing in a bung with seal etc & when it came to needing oil draining the dealers could pull the diff nose and drain it through that, and charge more for the service, or if it was done privately sell the gasket as a value add.
If making a 10 minute service job into a hour one and saving 60 pence per car was the best idea, you can see the mindset that ruled. But average joe or joan would never really know about why their x thousand mile service cost a bit more, and so we spiraled towards the bottom and a disposable consumer product future.

Interesting car the herald, the place I did my auto engineering diploma had one with no shell on it, which was used as a sort of campus runaround.

At least with the Brexit, we´ll have less of those old polluting ICE on the roads of EU and more shiny new VW.
Also for those who cannot afford a trip to Cuba, England will be a cheap destination of choice: Observing the vestigial Empire subjects drive such antiques will be very entertaining !

2000 Expedition, drop the column, 20 bolts to pull the dash, If you have a center console that has to come out first. Then you can see the heater box. The core has lines through the fire wall that end under the cowl so you can’t see to remove or remake the connections when you have to change the core.

Ask me how I know, and how much fun it is to do in the burgh, in February, outside..

I disagree with your conclusion that “maker” manufacturing isn’t a great new manufacturing paradigm. You’re judging it by the standards of mass manufacture, which is an apples-to-oranges comparison. Mass manufacture has the goal of delivering as many identical objects to as many consumers as possible, at the smallest possible price. In making something in your basement, of course you’ll never compete. You’re the single specialist that Ford’s assembly line replaced with a dozen unskilled workers, all of whom could do their task in a tiny fraction of a percent of the time. (more car parts per hour, and thus more cars, in turn means more profit per workforce-hour, and thus more profit to pay for more men)

However, this falls flat on it’s face as soon as variation is required. As ford put it, “You can have any color you want, so long as it’s black.” When each person builds their project, it’s built to their exact needs and specifications. For mass manufacture to attempt this is impossible, simply because you’d have to retool the entire assembly line between each and every object that rolls off. Perhaps we might see some level of hybridization with coming industries like prosthesis manufacturing, where technologies like 3D printers can allow for more flexibility, but it’s still really easy to get the worst of both worlds with increased cost and a still required minimum level of standardization (standard fasteners, standards crates to hold assembled parts, etc.) This is the kind of issue that baggage handlers have and the like, since many people have luggage, but it varies quite a bit.

Side note:
Prosthesis have their own issues. They’re still crappy enough that nobody would voluntarily accept them when otherwise able bodied, and that means the the market will remain small and economically unattractive, hampering research and exploration. There are so few people with disabilities out there that society can (and unfortunately often does) ignore them and their needs unless compelled by regulation or other artificial pressures.

Only when the state of the art has slowly dragged itself to the point of being moderately acceptable will it be picked up by fringe cases that are willing to accept them, which might finally provide some small amount of traction. One example would be arm prosthesis that have developed to have a reasonable (though not natural) sense of touch, but are also made of fireproof materials. This might provide enough incentive to firefighters to make the switch, since it would allow them to move hot objects with impunity and less cumbersome protective gear.

Alternatively, they might occur as a side benefit to research into robotics (where’s there’s more money due to the utility to manufacturing and other areas, at many different scales), which has many of the same goals. It’s actually a more difficult problem as even more layers have to be replicated, including those handled by the human brain (like motion planning). The one issue with robotics is they aren’t constrained by the human form or environment, so developments might be of limited utility to disabled persons.

1994 Oldsmobile Achieva. The heater core is “easy” to get to. There’s a panel on the bottom of the heater box that comes off but first any center console on the floor has to come out. the connecting pipes go right out through the firewall and the hose connections aren’t too bad to get at from under the car.

It’s a good thing it’s replaceable without taking half the car apart because the OEM core has plastic pipes heat-shrunk onto the metal pipes from the core.

Guess what eventually happens to plastic that softens when hot, when you run high pressure, heated liquid through it. You get a lake on the front floor.

Holy crap. HP did that as well. One of my earliest jobs was to place that exact sticker on each and every computer that rolled down the line… on the inside.

I pestered the engineer by pointing out the fallacy of it. I was told the following excuses:
It’s not intended for the end consumer, it’s for the HP technician when they go on site for repairs.
It’s an ISO requirement.
It interferes with the vacuum lift.
Improved cosmetics (these were rack units)
And finally… “you’re fired.” Yep, HP fired me for questioning a senior engineer about it.

I heard six months later from an ex-coworker, they moved the sticker to the outside after determining that the static from the sticker during application likely increased their failure rate. And the asshole engineer who figured that out? Yeah….

Oh… and if you want to see if one of those pieces of shits were mine, look for a small stylized “E” on the frame just as you open the panel (after reading the directions of course). I started doing that for about six months prior and reached a little over 20% rebuilds IIRC. HP was sending most servers to a warehouse, not sell them, have someone strip them down then recycle the parts.

Anyone who has ever worked on a Chrysler, Plymouth or Dodge knows the pain of eventually having to buy at least one expensive, special tool to do some thing – and unless they work on several of the same vehicle they’ll never use the tool again.

For over 100 years there’s been one company working hand in hand with MoPar to design all of those special tools. MoPar, their dealer shops and the occasional independent shop or intrepid home shop mechanic are their only customers.

I needed to do some valve work on a 2004 Dodge Dakota OHC V8. There’s also an OHC V6 that’s essentially the V8 minus two cylinders. The valve tool hooks under the camshaft and has a hinged part to press down on the valve spring. The hook part also has a square hole for a ratchet or breaker bar.

Now for the kicker. There are two versions of the tool, one for V6 and one for V8. They have different part numbers, even their illustrations in the tool catalog are different. The V6 tool has a lower price than the V8 tool. But the two tools are *identical* except for the part number cast in raised digits. The “V6” tool hooks around the V8 camshaft and pushes the valve spring down just like it does when used on a V6. No mechanic with a gram of common sense buys the “V8” tool for these engines.

I called the tool manufacturer (before buying the tool) and asked if the two were identical. Yes, they are. “So why are there two different part numbers and prices?” “Because Chrysler wants it that way.” They know they’re the same, will willingly admit they are the same, and they’ll happily rip off the gullible who insist they must use the “V8” tool on their V8.

A DIY tool for these engines would be likely to damage the camshafts, which are made of a steel tube with the lobes welded to them. Gouging the tube can cause them to crack. It’s also much easier to just buy the tool designed specifically for these engines.
I did try a prybar but after a few minutes of that not working I said hell with it and bought the damn special tool.

As I said above, MoPar and their special tool manufacturer work hand in hand to design their stuff to need special tools and have done so for 100+ years.

If the tool hooks under the camshaft, you must be compressing valve springs with the heads still on the block, correct? When or why would you need to do this? If you did it to replace a broken spring, seems the valve would drop down onto the piston, and you’d have hell getting a new spring back on.

I instantly considered that solution, but never considered, (in the 450 milliseconds of the throught,) that it would be a practice. The solution is oddly apparent, but flummoxing, despite achams razor.

Take my F150’s anemic heater flap dedign and dash removal to replace a poor oem part (aftermarket is v good w some metal,) please. A exhorcism through the glive box can be done as a hack.

That era spawned many overly-complex designs in the UK. My first car was a Humber Sceptre. 4-speed manual with electrically-switched overdive on 3rd and 4th gear via a stalk on the steering column. One could drive round town in 3rd / 3rd overdrive without touching the gear stick. Great fun (until the overdrive died and destroyed the car).

Ball-joint is used for giving free movement to the car at the same instant, which includes rotating in those planes. Ball Joints are spherical bearings that connect the control arms to the steering knuckles.The bearing stud is narrow and fits into a tapered hole in the steering knuckle. A protected encasing prevents dirt from getting into the joint assembly. To know about car parts and how to maintain it is a difficult task.

Ah, the delights of a heater matrix….I opted to replace one in a Renault 19. it took me in three days in zero degrees centigrade of cold but saved me £600. And yes, they were short days. Climbing into a footwell dressed like an Arctic explorer will never be repeated unless I’m greased on the outside
Dad had a white convertible Triumph Herald in the 70s. He must’ve been 49 at the time and thought “this is my moment”…. we’d sit in the back and “enjoy” the breeze that came in during a rainy North England winter